California street has costliest office rentals: report

Ilaina Jonas

2 Min Read

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Forget Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue. Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, is the most expensive street in North America for office renters, according to a report released by real estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle Inc on Wednesday.

The home of technology venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, Sand Hill Road ranked as the most expensive street for office space with an average rent of $113.64 a square foot, according to the study of 40 North American office markets.

The top full-service rent on the street, a stretch of office parks, was $198 per square foot. The average price for the Menlo Park market was $54 per square foot.

“Location is everything in real estate and this study proves it,” said John Sikaitis, Jones Lang LaSalle senior vice president of research.

Coming in second was Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, home of such hedge funds as Carl Icahn’s Icahn Associates Corp. Fifth Avenue had average office rent of $97.14 per square foot, according to the study. The top rent was $141 per square foot, nearly three times the average office rent of $53.49 per square foot for midtown Manhattan.

Another hedge fund bastion -- Greenwich Avenue, the main thoroughfare of Greenwich, Connecticut -- was third at $89.86 per square foot.

Facebook’s home on University Avenue in Palo Alto, California, was fourth at an average of $83.16 per square foot, according to the study.

Lawfirms and lobbyists pushed rents on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C., to an average of $80.25 per square foot, according to the study.